--- Damon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >--- Damon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > >Or that it was a medieval German that invented the printing press.
> >
> >The chinese invented the printing press. That german just copied it.
>
> IIRC the Chinese version used wooden blocks where the text was fixed. The
> German version used a pallete composed of individual blocks of letters. The
>
> Chinese may have developed something similar, but the European version was
> clearly superior. Yet another sign of cultural stagnation?
>
That is a common misunderstanding. The text of Chinese are charachters per
word. Although many of the same "radicals" are used for differnt words, the
arnagment and size are different. Further more to really be comparable to a
western language "word" chinese must at times use more than one word.
Therefore, these groups of words were blocks themselves.
In the begining blocs per page were created, but it became easier, and quite
obviouse for each "printer" to begin cutting into older pages and rearanging
the the charachtes -pictograms-. This was more efficient due to the language
itself which would require about ~10,000 seperate blocks to print all
possible sentences given 3000 common chinese words.
=====
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Jan William Coffey
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